Good evening! A few things on my radar as the week wraps up:

Bloomberg Businessweek has a deep look at BusPatrol, the company that's attached AI-powered stop-arm cameras to about 35,000 school buses across 24 states and more than 350 districts. The pitch is straightforward: safety enforcement at no cost to districts, paid for by ticket revenue from drivers who illegally pass stopped buses. The company and its district partners argue that the cameras change driver behavior and protect kids getting on and off buses. However, in Montgomery County, Maryland, more than 375,000 tickets and $92 million in fines later, violations haven't meaningfully dropped, and there's no evidence of fewer collisions near stopped buses. The county spent years routing most of that revenue back to BusPatrol before keeping any for itself.

NOTUS, the DC political news site launched in 2023, announced today that it's rebranding as The Star and expanding into local news and sports — a direct response to the Washington Post's February layoffs, which cut more than 300 journalists and gutted the paper's metro and local sports desks.

Two years ago, I wrote about the impact of local newsroom closures on education coverage. The picture was grim then — 2.5 local papers closing per week, more than half of U.S. counties with limited news access — and Pew's Local News Fact Sheet, out this week, doesn't make it any rosier.

A well-funded D.C. outlet expanding into local coverage is genuinely good news. Whether The Star puts real reporting capacity on schools — DCPS, the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, the broader regional ed ecosystem — is the question I'll be watching. The Post's cuts didn't just hit sports.

— Thomas

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